You can’t talk about Juneteenth without first talking about the Emancipation Proclamation. Abraham Lincoln was primarily looking to “stick it” to the South by signing this document. It proclaimed all slaves in the rebelling states free.Read more...

Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks, and the Government's Response

By Sheryl Wright

Bradley Manning, the army private accused of releasing government documents to WikiLeaks, is facing 22 additional charges, including "aiding the enemy...through indirect means.” I agree with those quoted in the article who believe that this particular charge is setting up a dangerous precedent.

Sheryl: In a bit of irony, the U.S. is developing an unexpected reputation within the corporate world. Recent stories about an Ikea plant in Virginia indicate the United States—much like Bangladesh, Vietnam, China, and Honduras—is now seen as a preferred destination for corporations in search of lower production costs. Read more...

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Entries in first amendment
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Here’s the thing about free speech, inevitably, it’s going to hurt your feelings. The appropriate response is not to legislate the content of the speech, but to ensure the viability of more speech. This is precisely what the Supreme Court did in its recent opinion in Snyder v. Phelps, a case involving the right to protest in a public square.

The Phelps lead the Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church, which espouses the view that God is punishing the United States for its tolerance and legal protection of the rights of gays and lesbians by killing American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. To disseminate this view, the church identifies when a fallen soldier will be buried and then plans a protest near the burial site. As in the Snyder case, the church abides by local laws regarding the holding of protests. In fact, because of the persistence of the church in appearing at military funerals, many states have passed laws that create time, place, and manner restrictions on the picketing of these funerals.

This particular case concerned a father, Albert Snyder of York, Pa., who became distraught because the Westboro group picketed the funeral of his son, Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, a U.S. Marine killed in Iraq in March 2006. The church uses quite abhorrent speech, including signs proclaiming "You're Going to Hell" to make its point. Often, if not always, the speech damns the fallen soldier in defamatory ways. But since you can’t defame a dead person, plaintiffs need other ways to make a claim against the church. The Snyders used the claim of intentional infliction of emotional distress, a claim that rests on the callous disregard by the speaker of the effect of his speech on the target, and intrusion upon seclusion, the claim that a defendant's intrusion into a plaintiff's personal matters is so offensive that a reasonable person would be as offended as the plaintiff.

The district court ruled in Snyder’s favor; the jury awarded him $11 million in damages, but the judge cut the amount to $5 million. The 4th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, however, ruled in favor of the church, primarily on First Amendment grounds. The Supreme Court, in an 8-to-1 decision penned by Chief Justice John Roberts, affirmed the 4th Circuit’s judgment.

Listen, the facts of the Snyder case are hard to swallow, I’m willing to admit. But that doesn’t mean that we ought not to protect the rights of the defendants, the Phelps, to exercise their right to speak freely. As the wife of a soldier, I can appreciate the distress Mr. Snyder and his family experienced at such a vulnerable moment in their grieving process. The deeply homophobic speech seems like a personal, visceral attack aimed at denying the sacrifice of these men and women. But, I can promise you, the Phelps could care less about any of the actual individuals whose funerals they’ve protested. They’re concerned with using political and religious speech to express a perspective on contemporary social policies and politics.

Let’s applaud public universities and colleges that are willing, as was the University of Wisconsin at Madison, to stand by the principles of academic freedom, even as they fulfill their statutory obligations. Scholars, like William Cronon, should not be harassed as they go about the work of teaching, researching, and writing about the world that we live in. Critical perspectives on pressing issues benefit us all as they contribute to our individual ability to make informed choices for ourselves.

Here’s what I tell my son when he asks me if something is a bad word—“Would that hurt your feelings if someone called you that? If so, then yes, it probably is a bad word.” But that is a lesson about civility and empathy, not a lesson about free speech and democracy. Civility is a building block, not the end result of democracy. We ought to engage with one another on civil terms, but we must be willing to fight for the ideals we value by exercising our right to free speech and protecting the rights of others, with whom we may be virulently opposed, to freely express their ideas. Let us who value social justice speak louder and be more insistent than those who would silence and ridicule us. Let ours be the voice and vision of a transformative politics in the public square. Let us speak and be free.